The FEC is taking up the disclaimer issue after news reports last year indicated that a handful of campaigns from both parties had put bloggers on their payrolls. The most contentious example came in South Dakota, where GOP senatorial candidate John Thune paid $35,000 to two local bloggers who ran sites critical of the state's largest newspaper's coverage of Thune's Democratic opponent, incumbent Thomas A. Daschle.
Neither the Thune campaign nor the bloggers revealed the relationship until it was disclosed in his finance reports. Both the campaign and the bloggers -- one a history professor, the other a lawyer -- denied they were paid to write, saying they were hired as consultants. The Daschle camp said the two were paid to smear the lawmaker.
Those who want additional disclosure requirements said they fear that scenario will become increasingly common as politicians become more sophisticated in using the Internet, as blogs attract larger audiences and as more mainstream news outlets report on -- and amplify -- what the blogosphere is saying.
But their complaints are meeting skepticism from those who say additional reporting requirements are not only unnecessary but would be legally suspect and difficult to enforce.
Some said, for example, that campaigns routinely take a magnifying glass to their opponents' finance reports -- and can be relied upon to publicize any unannounced payments to bloggers. And some said such requirements would impose obligations on bloggers that are not expected of anyone else who takes money from campaigns and then sounds off on them in other media, such as letters to newspapers or calls to radio shows.
Trevor Potter, a former FEC commissioner, said as a practical matter it would often be difficult to distinguish between those who have been hired to blog and those who have been hired for some other reason -- to help run a campaign's Internet operations, for example -- and, as is increasingly the case these days, also happen to have a blog.
"The problem is that it's not going to be clear when a blogger is speaking in his or her capacity as a paid employee or consultant to a campaign and when they happen to be an employee or consultant and are blogging on their own," he said.
Some political bloggers say disclaimers are unnecessary because most of them make no attempt to hide their support or opposition to individual candidates. Relatively few, some say, would risk their credibility and readership by accepting undisclosed payments -- and that those who do would be quickly outted by other bloggers.
"I think a lot of these things are reasonable as a matter of ethics," said Duncan Black, who runs a popular liberal blog called Eschaton under the pen name Atrios. "But that's different from being reasonable as a matter of law."
